10th March 1959 : Ashiana, Bombay, India

An American woman named Ursula Sylvia Hellman, 48, also met Baba on the 10th. Born in Berlin, Hellman married, but her husband was killed by the Gestapo for helping Jews. She developed an interest in spirituality, and in 1955 spent six months in Rishikesh with Swami Shivananda.  She became the first Western woman to be initiated into sanyas in 1956 and was christened Swami Sivananda Radha. In 1959, she was on her way back to the Himalayas. Arnavaz had met her by chance in a shop and invited her to her apartment "to meet a living saint."

Sylvia Hellman later wrote about her encounter with Baba:

Then came a moment when Meher Baba motioned me by a gesture of his hand to come close. I also bowed in reverence to him. I could do no less after having witnessed such a miraculous manifestation of love that I can only regard as of a divine nature.

I was a stranger from across the ocean, a woman from a different culture. Meher Baba pulled me up too and looked very deeply into my eyes for a few seconds — or was it eternity? I received his blessing as his eyes burned like two big suns, and his beautiful smile came from the heart.

I could see nothing but this intensity; the human being, the man, faded and disappeared ... The impact of the beautiful light of love that I had seen in Baba's eyes was so great that all these details [of the surroundings] were almost blotted out.

Lord Meher on-line : page 1958-9

Reference book : Gods Who Walk the Rainbow (Timeless Books, B.C., 1981), p. 78. Sylvia Hellman (1911–1995) wrote many books and founded a yoga ashram in Canada.